Temporary helium shortage hits party-balloon business

Helium prices are rising faster than a runaway balloon, and tighter supplies of the lighter-than-air gas are turning some party suppliers into party poopers as they ration rental tanks and balloons.

Tim Feran, The Columbus Dispatch

Helium prices are rising faster than a runaway balloon, and tighter supplies of the lighter-than-air gas are turning some party suppliers into party poopers as they ration rental tanks and balloons.

“The last time I paid for helium was three weeks ago,” said Dylan Lane, manager of Cap Party Supplies on the South Side. “It was $186.50 for a tank of 291 cubic feet. This time last year, it cost $68 for a tank.”

In a recent survey of balloon stores, florists and others by the International Balloon Association, 54 percent of respondents said they were experiencing difficulty obtaining helium, and almost 90 percent said they had experienced a price increase in helium in the past year.

The bad news: “It’s going to be tight for a while,” said Maura Garvey of trade publication CryoGas International.

But the good news is, “it’s a temporary situation,” she said. “There have been some stories that the world is running out of helium, but nothing could be further from the truth.”

Several issues have been at work, she said, leading to the current shortages.

In the United States, a larger portion of helium comes from the government’s National Helium Reserve, a vast underground gas field in Amarillo, Texas, that was started in 1925 to guarantee a supply for essential uses. Another big source — the world’s largest helium facility, in fact — is a plant in western Wyoming owned by Exxon Mobil Corp.

Both the federal facility and the Exxon Mobil facility had to shut down for maintenance in the past few months.

“It was supposed to be a few weeks, but it’s been prolonged,” Garvey said. “It created a real crunch in the market.”

Big plants overseas, in Algeria and Qatar, slowed their production of helium during the recession and have yet to get back up to speed.

“So there aren’t enough plants in place to meet the demand.” Garvey said. “Customers have been put on up-to-50-percent allocation. That’s why balloon people haven’t been able to get it.”

But other helium customers have been able to get what they need.

Although helium is probably best known for its use in party balloons, it is far more commonly used — when it is cooled into a liquid — as a coolant in medical and manufacturing devices.

For example, hospitals use helium to cool the magnets in MRI machines, and the aerospace and electronics industries are major users of helium in manufacturing. One computer maker recently unveiled the first disk drive that spins in a compartment filled with helium instead of air.

Because Ohio State University’s Wexner Medical Center is prioritized to get whatever it needs, it hasn’t experienced a shortage of helium, a spokesman said. But medical-center officials have noticed higher prices for helium, he said.

Medical and industrial uses take precedence over decorative and recreational uses — which is as it should be, said Marty Fish, executive director of the International Balloon Association, “but we don’t want to see the balloon industry kicked to the curb because we aren’t a strategic industry. We are a $50 billion industry.”

The best guess as to when the “artificial tightness” in helium supply will loosen is by the end of this year, Garvey said.

In the meantime, stores are coping as best they can.

Kroger is “rationing our helium because of the shortage,” said spokeswoman Jackie Siekmann. “It’s still for sale. We have helium in our stores, and we have balloons. But we’re conserving it for our customers. We’ve instructed our store managers not to use ‘on sale’ balloons and not to use balloons at the end of aisles.”

At Cook’s Balloonery in Westerville, “we have seen a lot more walk-in business since grocery stores cut supplies,” said Brittany Cook.

Cook’s Balloonery has “tried to keep the balloons as close as possible to the same price as we charged in the past,” Cook said. “But the biggest thing is that 80 percent of our business is helium rental. We’ve lost a lot of customers. They needed to go somewhere where they could get the helium quicker.”

Cap Party Supplies also has had to raise the price it charges for helium balloons — from about 65 cents a balloon to 95 cents a balloon — although the price increase hasn’t affected sales yet.

“People are still going to party,” Lane said.

tferan@dispatch.com

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